Category Archives: space

I hope to receive more stories for Alice Unbound. These can be SF, horror, fantasy, or a subgenre. They should be present time or future, and involve a character or sense of Lewis Carroll’s world. They should not be in his style, but your own and I do not want retellings of stories that already exist. Put the Jabberwock in the zoo, or the Caterpillar in space. Perhaps the Mad Hatter is an ineffectual detective and the Walrus and Carpenter are facing a rebellion from the oysters who are campaigning on animal cruelty. Maybe the Duchess now has her own estate but is plagued by pigs. Go wild. Think beyond the borders and if you’re not sure, send me a query. The guidelines and submission portal are here: https://exilepublishing.submittable.com/submit/77982/alice-unbound Remember, you must be living in Canada to submit to this anthology.

In other news, Joshua Pantellersco interviewed me last month. You can listen to the podcast, where I talk about Alice and writing and other things. Check out Just Joshing here, and listen to his interviews with some other writers as well. And the Canadian Aurora nominations are nearly closed. I have numerous poems and several stories that are eligible for nomination. The poems are all almost found online, and one story. The Aurora lists have problems with listing works by authors so it makes it more difficult and you’ll have to do a search, but links are provided.

Futuristica Vol. II, by Metasagas Press

In publishing news, I received my copy of The Sum of Us, edited by Susan Forest and Lucas Law, with my story “The Healer’s Touch.” Stories are about healers and caregivers and some of the proceeds go to chairty. Release date is Sept. but you can pre-order. And I also received Futuristica Vol. II edited by Chester Hoster, with my story “Love in the Vapors.” These both came last week, during my birthday. And my poem “Voodoo Doll” is now up at Grievous Angel and free to read. “Changes” came out in Deep Waters 2 earlier this year. And a poem “This Song” is in DeadLights magazine.

I’ve been on a bit of my own hiatus, possibly reading fiction for Alice Unbound. But I’m about to start working on some new pieces. You should too. Pick up a pen, a pencil, a tablet a computer and be inspired. 🙂

Tesseracts 17 is now out with tales from Canadian writers that span all times and places.

William Meikle hails from Scotland and Newfoundland, and brings us a tale of deep space mystery with “In the Bubble.” http://www.williammeikle.com

CA: “In the Bubble” is hard core SF, in space with a mysterious murder. Do you think when we do head for the stars that humanity will come together against a common unknown (space) or do you think humankind’s baser emotions will still play out their dramas?

I’m a pessimist when it comes to humanity. We’re just too stupid to see beyond immediate gain and look at the big picture—we are already way too far down the line to disaster, and I can’t see us getting anywhere close to the stars. We’ll kill ourselves off first, over food and water rights on a dying planet. There’s a cheery thought to start a new year.

CA: Do you think science will one day take us to being able to read another person’s thoughts? Do you think it will make communication better or worse if this could happen?

I think something close will be possible— some kind of emotion reader should be doable very soon, and people are already working on turning dreams into screen images. I doubt it will improve communication. It will make misunderstandings less common, sure. But it will also mean people would know exactly what you think of them. I foresee a lot more punch-ups.

CA: Would you ever want to literally get inside someone’s head to think, see or feel as they do?

William Meikle writes mysteries that take place in space and in Glasgow.

Nope. Not even remotely. I have enough trouble inside my own head as it is. I think part of what makes us human is trying to figure out what other people are thinking. If we ever actually find out, the mystery is gone. Then what is left?

CA: Since your story is also a crime thriller in space, do you write other mysteries, and do you enjoy reading them?

CA: I do indeed enjoy reading them—I grew up on a diet of Ed McBain, Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie amid all the genre work I was reading. Quite a lot of that has seeped into my own writing, in particular into my Midnight Eye series. Derek Adams is a Glasgow PI, usually down to his last cigarette and bottle of scotch, wearily fighting his way though the Glasgow underworld and the supernatural elements that keep leaping at him despite his best efforts to avoid it. I’ve also attempted a cozy murder mystery, and have a collection published of weird Sherlock Holmes stories. I suspect there’s more to come.

CA: What other projects do you have in the works?

I’m busy. I’m in the middle of a six book contract with DARKFUSE for horror works, I have a Professor Challenger collection coming this year from DARK RENAISSANCE among other things, and I’m currently coming to the end of the writing of three Sherlock Holmes novellas. After that I have a ghost story collection I want to write, and a space opera novel that’s been gestating for a while, so I’m going to be busy for years to come yet.

William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with twenty novels published in the genre press and over 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. His work has appeared in a number of professional anthologies and magazines with recent sales to NATURE Futures, Penumbra and Buzzy Mag among others. He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company. When he’s not writing he plays guitar, drinks beer and dreams of fortune and glory.

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Sci Fi Channel is trying a new branding idea that is seriously going to backfire on them. Really, I don’t watch TV but I’ve heard enough, including comments on my writers’ groups that say this is one big dumb idea.

The executives, those guys who get paid the big bucks, decided that the term sci fi (pronounced sie fie) which people everywhere identify with science fiction was just too geeky and they wanted to distance themselves from that overly geeky image.

“The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network.

Anti-social boys as opposed to the general public and the female audience? Urr, have any of these guys actually paid attention to the changing world of science fiction in the last fifty years? Have they noticed that the stories and characters are farther reaching, that perhaps they’re thinking cliche here? Yes, the demographics will still have a majority of men but I’m thinking not as big a margin of difference as they might believe. Hmm, well they want to broaden their audience. That’s a good thing, right? “We spent a lot of time in the ’90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it’s called Sci Fi,” Mr. Brooks said. “It’s somewhat cooler and better than the name ‘Science Fiction.’ But even the name Sci Fi is limiting.” They wanted to distance themselves from what they were selling. How odd. The execs must suffer from a lot of split personality disorders.

So, in their infinite wisdom, they have decided that a rebranding of a channel that shows science fiction and fantasy programs will be better if it doesn’t look like sci fi, even though that’s what they’re selling, sci fi shows. The think tanks specialists of NBC worked long and hard I’m sure, trying to find the right name. Over 300 ideas in fact. And guess what they came up with: SyFy. Yep, if you think that sounds the same as sci fi, you’re right.

“When we tested this new name, the thing that we got back from our 18-to-34 techno-savvy crowd, which is quite a lot of our audience, is actually this is how you’d text it,” Mr. Howe said.

Hilarious. I mean, if I was being techno savvy and texting I would use SF, pronounced ess eff. My techno-savvy friends would figure that out and it takes fewer letters. And aren’t they trying to bring in new viewers besides those techno-savvy viewers who are already watching? But “SF”, maybe the general public can’t recognize what that stands for so SyFy will look better and “cooler” as the execs proclaim. Cooler. Yeah, way cool. And of course more identifiable as umm…science fiction but not science fiction.

I wonder why they didn’t go for “skiffy,” one former pronunciation of the term sci fi, which I was told once was what the nongeeky people called SF. It just sounded too goofy to me. In the world of speculative fiction where we who are female or older than sixteen but perhaps still geeky tend to say sci fi, or SF or science fiction even. We even say speculative fiction to encompass horror, fantasy and science fiction. I’ve not noticed people at the theaters worrying about what category the films like Wall-E, Watchmen or Star Wars fit into. In fact, Vancouver’s top grossing movie last week was Watchmen. But then:

Mr. Brooks said that when people who say they don’t like science fiction enjoy a film like “Star Wars,” they don’t think it’s science fiction; they think it’s a good movie.

And that’s the point. They don’t think sci fi, SF or SyFy. They look at what they think they will enjoy. A rose by any other name? But hey, if these big execs want to spend their time mixing letters up, well that shows what’s important. I wonder what their programming will be like. I’d like a job like this, to spend time thinking up a new way to spell the same word.

Oh and I really hope they haven’t gone international with this. If they have, people in Poland may not be so quick to jump on the bandwagon as “syfy” translates to something like heretical and unclean. The full article is below and people’s comments are worth reading as it indicates how well the brand change is going over.

It’s nice to know that in all those beliefs we have about aliens from other planets and how they must be highly advanced technologically (otherwise they couldn’t fly all those light years), that they also seem to have some driving mishaps from time to time. I just wonder if it was drunk driving and what an alien might find as hooch, methane perhaps? Imagine, the crop circles are aliens setting down in a farmer’s field and sucking the methane from the cow patties, having a UFO tailgate party and putting something on the barbee. Or maybe they drink corn syrup. Who knows?

Some people might argue that if they have technology to fly light years, that they would not run into a wind turbine. But let’s say that aliens might look at us and say, they have techology to drive so they’d never run into a telephone pole. There is one factor in both of these: human (or alien error). People make mistakes so maybe there was just a bad driver at the ship’s controls. But then maybe this accident in Lincolnshire had to do with low visibility (the video shows an awful lot of haze) or maybe they were sightseeing and got distracted. “Hey, Mabel, lookit that weird critter with black and white spots and the giant udder!” The witness in the first article looks an awaful lot like an alien to me and really, there is nothing more alien than humans. I also like that tentacles are mentioned by one witness in the second article. A UFO with tentacles! A giant squid! Could be ball lightning. Nah, it was the flying spaghetti monster whose spaghetti like tentacles wrapped around the blade and stole it. Yes, that’s it. All hail the spaghetti monster.

In writing news, I have just sold “A Taste for Treasure” to Alison’s Wonderland, an erotic fairy tale anthology by Harlequin, edited by Alison Tyler. Good money, even if they do ask for all rights until they’re finished with it. I also received my copies of The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica by Running Press, edited by Maxim Jakubowski. I do love getting those checks in British pounds. It’s almost double the money and more for the reprint than I was paid for the original story.

I’ve also sold a poem “Collecting” to Sotto Voce but I asked them a question on the contract and haven’t heard back from them so hopefully they’ll respond. I really really hope to get back to writing my novel next week. I’ve farted around long enough now.

And in BC we are charged a provincial tax besides the federal GST. PST is not charged on food, but I’ve discovered the Pharmasave on Columbia St. in New Westminister has been. When I asked them, I was told that chips and chocolates aren’t food. I said, yes it is, you ingest it and the gov’t website says it’s exempt. “But it’s a confection. It’s not like a granola bar.” Errr, yes, but that is still food. Sure, it may not be nutritional (and many granola bars are suspect because of their high sugar content and the chocolate chips in them too) but it’s still food.

Yeesh. Well, since I had already written to the Pharmasave head office in November and received no reply, and they were still charging PST, I filed a complaint with the Ministry of Business and Revenue, and then I emailed the CEO. That has got results but still, Pharmasave has been raking in money, whether they’re turning it over to the government or not, but taking it illegally. I hate paying taxes and hate it more when it’s taken for items it shouldn’t be.

Everyone’s seeing Red for the next millennium. Will our children be living on the red planet? (First published on Technocopia in 1999. Remember it’s partly future history now.)

Events are heating up in the space race and our nearest planetary neighbor is the target. Mars has been of interest to scientists and writers for decades. Now, more than ever, exploration is taking place, as well as educational programs and developmental projects in the hopes of colonizing Mars in the near future.

NASA, the Planetary Society, the Mars Society, as well as individual groups and organizations, are encouraging interest in colonizing Mars. The children learning about it today could be manning those first missions planned for 2020-2030. That’s only twenty years! (Or ten, now.)

The big questions being asked are:

Does Mars still have water (frozen beneath its crust)?

Is there any life form from microbe to bigger evident on the planet?

Can we afford to economically, ethically and physically send manned missions to Mars?

Can Mars sustain an artificially generated environment?

Can it be colonized in the future?

On December 3, NASA’s Polar Lander will land on Mars. This is the just the beginning of Mars exploration. The Planetary Society’s microphone, as well as the Deep Space 2 microprobes, on the exploratory vessel will record any sounds. These recordings will be available several days after the landing on Mars and broadcast through the society’s Planetfest ’99 program so that people can listen to the first sounds ever heard from the Red Planet.

At least two soil/info-gathering missions will be launched from 2001 on; the Mars Surveyor 2001 Orbiter and Lander. It will land on Mars in 2002 with the first soil samples returning in 2003. More samples will come in four-year intervals afterward. The analyses on these will tell if there is past or present life and what minerals make up Martian soil. Scientists now believe that all the planet’s water is still there, but buried as permafrost and beneath that a liquid water table kilometers deep.

Will We Destroy Before We Create?

There are probably not many planetary environmentalists yet but the possibility of Martian soil samples containing microbes that could contaminate and wreak worldwide havoc on Earth is already being considered. As well, there is some concern that Earth vehicles landing on other planets might carry microbes that could contaminate and destroy alien life before we have a chance to study it. It’s less than five years until Martian soil arrives on Earth.

It’s argued that Earth microbes couldn’t contaminate Mars because:

Atmospheric pressure is so low that any liquid would boil away to vapor

Atmosphere is so thin that solar ultraviolet light has sterilized Mars’s surface

Most of the planet’s surface is below freezing

Most probes and launchers starting with the Viking landers were baked for 40 hours at 112 degrees C, but considering the strong anti-oxidants in the Martian surface, it was decided that only on “life-detection” landers will sterilization be necessary. This leaves less possibility of contaminating a sample with possible “chemical fossil” or microbes from Earth left on a lander. However, any manned mission would complicate the possibility of contaminants. Germs would escape from an airlock opening; likewise any waste produced by a mission would have the same problem. The first manned missions would most likely have astronauts in orbit around the planet while sterilized machines gathered data and transported it back to the space stations or ships. Testing in underwater volcanic regions and beneath Antarctica’s ice is already underway to simulate possible situations on Mars.

Optimists like Robert Zubrin, former Lockheed Martin engineer and now president of the Mars Society, say that the first manned mission could be in ten years. NASA takes a more conservative approach and believes manned missions will begin around 2014-2020, with the first manned team launching in 2018. They hope to have the Mars team stay on the planet for a year and a half. That’s at least a five-year mission for any astronaut.

Looking to the Future

The U.S. Secretary of Education, Richard W. Riley, launched the Mars Millennium Project in August. Partially sponsored by the Planetary Society, it involves “artists, scientists, and astronauts,” as well as school age children. Over 40,000 schools and youth organizations have already signed up to participate in designing a possible community and its needs for 100 colonizers to live on Mars in 2030. That’s a great way to get tomorrow’s citizens participating in missions to Mars and other planets.

Buzz Aldrin, the second person to set foot on the moon thirty years ago, is highly supportive of the Mars projects and hopes to be on one of the manned missions in 2012. He has a patent for a space station that will orbit Earth and Mars. He believes future funding will come from many areas including the “liberal arts community” and sees Mars as viable not only for exploration but as a tourist resource.

BBC and China Online report that China is also getting into the race for the Red Planet. Reports say that China is looking at manned missions to the moon and Mars by 2005, but with China’s secrecy about their space program it is difficult to find supporting documentation.

MIT graduates and students entered a Mars contest this summer with a business plan for Mars exploration. NASA definitely is planning for the future and priming people from school children to graduates into thinking of ways to generate funding and consider habitation solutions. According to CNN writer Robin Lloyd the Think Mars group, organized by Boston graduate students, first entered a NASA contest with a “goal to complete a business plan for human exploration of Mars in accordance with NASA’s objectives.”

Today’s children will be tomorrow’s Mars pioneers. Mars exploration opens up so many new fields of technology from making oxygen to how a life form alien to an environment can thrive many light years from home. Move over, Star Wars. Mars is real and getting closer every day.

The problems facing Mars colonization:

Requiring anywhere from $40 billion to $450 billion in funding

Psychological effects on astronauts so far from Earth physically and emotionally

Physical effects on astronauts in a sustained low-gravity environment

How to generate enough fuel, food and oxygen for the trip, which could take up to 26 months

Contamination of the planet by Earth microbes that could kill any existing organisms and the ethical consequences of destroying a new life form

Microbes, bacteria or radiation detrimental to plants or humans that are native to Mars

Not able to make a sustainable oxygen rich environment

The solutions and benefits to colonizing Mars:

Discovering other life and a better understanding of the universe

Building a space station to manufacture and process samples and equipment

Exploration landers are being sent up beginning in 2001 to carry out tests on the environment and to bring back soil samples

A MIPPP (Mars In-Situ Propellant Production Precursor) is already being tested that can generate oxygen out of a simulated Mars-thin atmosphere.

Space Station MIR has already given valuable information on prolonged space dwelling and its affects on the human body

Support of government, scientific, educational and commercial/corporate bodies in funding space exploration

Continued technology and ethical concerns for any preexisting life on both Mars and Earth

There are always anthologies coming and going. Unlike a magazine that comes out regularly, an anthology is a collection of stories by different authors often with a theme. They’re usually in book format as opposed to a paper magazine or an e-zine format, and they are one ofs.

This is much easier to do than deal with a magazine, continuous sales and subscriptions. Both types have their place of course. It’s something I want to do, some day edit an anthology. But until I can convince a publisher of the idea or get a bigger name, I think it’s going to have to wait. The problem with anthologies published in Canada is, that unless they’re distributed in the US, we just don’t have the population basis to sell enough. For that reason, most publishers shy from anthologies.
Two interesting anthologies coming up in Europe (though anyone can submit to them) actually are the antithesis of each other.

Dutch writer and editor Jetse de Vries will be editing Shine, an anthology due out in 2010 by Solaris Books. He’s not accepting submissions until May but that gives plenty of time to write a story specific to the theme. Shine is about shiny futures, the realm of optimistic SF. Often stories dealing with new technologies in the future end up with dire consequences. Shine is to be convincing and optimistic and of the near future (within the next 50 years).

There has of late been a movement in SF to write realistic near-future works, something that could or will possibly happen. No alien invasions, no faster than light travel, no transporters, but more of perhaps setting up a colony on the moon and the research required, or missions to Mars. These are aspects of space travel that NASA is seriously working on (as well as other space agencies) and they hope to have a manned Mars mission by 2030.

The name for this type of science fiction (which my brain can never seem to remember) is mundane SF. I guess it’s because I have connotations of mundane as being boring but there are two definitions:

1. everyday, ordinary, and therefore not very interesting
2. relating to the world or worldly matters

Obviously it is the second meaning that refers to the anthology and to the subgenre of mundane SF. I tried writing one story and I did find it hard, partly because I tend to write dark fantasy more often than SF. But then I realized I just finished a novelette that is in fact mundane SF. I don’t know if it will be shiny enough for Jetse but I’ll have to work on it and polish it and see how bright it looks. For full information on Shine, go to: http://shineanthology.wordpress.com/category/guidelines/

PS Publishing, out of England will be publishing Catastrophia. Edited by Allen Ashley, this anthology centers around post-apocalyptic fiction, disasters and catastrophes. Although hope and light can also come of such tropes in horror and SF, it’s not always as likely. If anything though, these tales start in a darker place.

Whereas Jetse isn’t accepting submissions until May, Allen is accepting now with a closing date of May or when full, whichever comes first. The theme of mundane SF could also be applied to this anthology since the aspects of disasters pertain to life on Earth, and that Allen Ashley wants them to be treated in a “modern manner.” No historical pieces here though modern or slightly futuristic will work. Of course, it’s possible he’d look at a futuristic post-apocalyptic world and the societies and cultures that would develop then. Full guidelines can be found here: http://news.pspublishing.co.uk/2008/09/09/catastrophia-anthology-call-for-submissions/

Between Shine and Catastrophia, there is something for everyone: the optimistic and the fatalistic, or perhaps fatalism with an uplifting end. Many anthologies don’t pay much. Pay could be a cent a word, fifty bucks, a share of royalties should the anthology actually sell. Catastrophia and Shine will both be paying professional rates.

I’ll probably give both of these a try. A themed anthology is always a good way to push the envelope and write something new. Like that one mundane SF I wrote about a mission to Mars; it was a challenge. I had to do a fair amount of research and extrapolating. But it was fun too and though I think that I hit both meanings of mundane, I did finish the story. But I need to do something else to it first to give it a bit more vim. And I’ll start thinking of something for Shine and Catastrophia.

What did Jackie Gleason know when he said, “To the moon, Alice. To the moon”? That one day without the aid of his hollow threats to Alice, that people would go to the moon. India has now joined the US, USSR, China and Japan in sending a ship to the moon. This is an unmanned, information gathering, two-year trip. NASA has also tossed a bunch of bucks toward it and India signed an agreement with NASA.

Back when the US was putting a man on the moon the USSR had to do so too in the Cold War era. Was it just a need to explore, for humankind’s reach to go further into the mystery of the stars or was it a race of paranoia so that one superpower could have supremacy over the other? Later there was the Star Wars program and other scary propositions on just what would happen if one country got the big guns into space before the other.

When I heard India was punting a ship to the moon I first thought, “What, another country that has to prove it can do it?” But after reading a bit more, it wasn’t another case of one upmanship but an effort in working together to further research and for India to be included in the future. Space travel has always been phenomenally expensive and the only way, and the most logical way, is to pool resources, both financial and research.

There is already a group of countries (Insternational Space Agencry) that are working together for future space flights and plans for Mars. But there are countries that continue to do their work in secret, not sharing and suspicious of any questions. China comes to mind. Perhaps as time and modernization progress China won’t see the US as running dog lackeys and the US won’t see China as the yellow menace.

Between India and China they hold one-third of the world’s population, and Asia has about 61% of the population according to a United Nations report. As time progresses more and more races will mix and eventually everyone may have the same creamy brown skin. White people are the minority as population goes. It will be a good thing when everyone looks like everyone else and racial fear will be lessened.

World population is expected to increase from the current 6.1 billion (2000) to 8.9 billion in 2050. That’s a 47% increase in 50 years. Natural resources will be depleted even further and pollution will accelerate, perhaps beyond repair. Truth to tell, work on pollution should have begun thirty years ago when Lovelace put forth his Gaia hypothesis. So let’s say that people keep multiplying like roaches. That’s why there is Mars and moon exploration. Sooner or later the infestation will have to spread or the human race will die down. Personally, global birth control wouldn’t be a bad thing. Limit how many children everyone can have, but that could be ugly to enforce unless people chose to do so to help keep the planet sustainable. Go forth and multiply is no longer needed. We’ve succeeded to the point of implosion.

You could say China and India have the most to gain with getting some of their two billion plus people into space. But what if religious, geographic or philisophical conflicts persist? What if people don’t share? Then it’s a race not just to see who can get to Mars or the moon or some other place first. It’s a race to see who can colonize first.

The chance of shooting people from Earth to space is still a pretty slim and expensive possibility though there is the capacity to do so now. The chance of taking over all of the moon or Mars is also slim and a long way in the future. Like the world’s mosaic, I hope that when we get to peopling the moon and Mars that it will be considered an extension of Earth and all races will have equal ownership. That does mean that there could be religious colonies or ethnic colonies and that we could bring our grievances and hatred into the stars. There is the fear of course of some fanatical group getting a stranglehold first but the moon and Mars are still pretty big places and trying to enforce sole ownership will be nigh to impossible for a long time .

I’m going to hope that we slow down our population growth, work together in space exploration and maybe by the time we’re colonizing, the world will be one big happy place. I can dream, can’t I?